Distributed teamwork gained significant importance within the last years. With team members collaborating from different locations, the role of workplace communication dramatically changed. Besides task-related communication, especially informal communication and awareness are important requirements for successful teamwork. While goal-oriented information exchange is widely supported by existing communication technologies, social communication is not. Carsten Röcker presents a novel approach for promoting informal interactions and awareness within distributed project teams. The author starts by outlining the characteristics as well as problems of multi-site teamwork and identifies the communication requirements of distributed teams. Based on these requirements, specific design guidelines for multi-user awareness systems are defined. In order to validate the guidelines, different communication tools are developed and tested in several evaluations. The author: born 1975, studies in electrical engineering and management at the Technical University of Darmstadt; from 2001 until 2006 research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Information and Publication Systems (IPSI) in Darmstadt; author and co-author of over 20 scientific publications in the areas of Ambient Intelligence and Intellectual Teamwork.weiterlesen